Nebraska’s highest summit!

The roadtrip home from Wyoming has no set agenda. The first stop was Fort Collins, Colorado, home of the very yummy Fat Tire beer from New Belgium Brewing. While there, I pondered the route home I would take and noticed that Nebraska was kinda in the way. I don’t know much about Nebraska, other than that they have some Corn Huskers there, but I thought to myself “they must have some summits in Nebraska”. It turns out they do! It also turns out that the highest summit is in the west, near the Colorado border (a very high state as it turns out), and the lowest is on the eastern border, near the Missouri river. Given that I was coming from the west, I decided to set my sights high and go for the highest Nebraska summit. My legs aren’t 100% yet after my Signal Hill summit, but I decided that a bit of exercise would do them good.

Panorama Point is in the middle of nowhere, but with a GPS and 4wd Jeep at my disposal, I was not afraid of the challenges ahead of me.

With our “Good Times” burgers in hand, we proceeded east from Fort Collins, eventually trading in our paved highway for long straight gravel roads past endless farms. We turned north, crossed into Nebraska and found the road that would take us to the trailhead… which we missed. When we came to the end of that road, we saw a very good sign pointing us back in the direction we’d come from:

From this point on, the ascent was relatively straight forward. With the summit in sight, we pushed forward to the top and we able to enjoy our cheeseburgers from our leather seats in the air conditioned dining hall that offered a splendid panoramic view.

Mission accomplished, and my battered legs withstood the challenge with ease! With Nebraska’s first and highest summit cheeseburger accomplished, we now go in search of Nebraska’s lowest summit to complete the bookends on this state.